Autumn in the Adirondacks

Christmas, Swine Flu and Credit Card Rates

As credit cards companies are raising their rates to unspeakable percentages prior to Congress enacting the Credit Card Act of 2009 and thanks to our Federal Government, the executives at CitiBank and Goldman Sacks are availing themselves of H1N1 vaccine ahead of the elderly, the young and pregnant women, you may want to pare down your Christmas giving with these 68 Ideas for Gifts in a Jar.

At least we'll eat.

(photo found here)

Congratulations, Yankees!

Paganism, Just Another Religion

Certainly, there is nothing new about Paganism per se. From Halloween to May Day to Yuletide, said Prof. Diana L. Eck of the Harvard Divinity School, “there’s a way in which all of us, especially in the Christian tradition, follow a religious calendar that is pegged to ancient Pagan festivals.”

But in the grand scheme of the Western world, polytheism was seen as being superseded by monotheism and faith itself by science, leaving Paganism as some kind of atavistic orphan of history. The fact that its practitioners lacked any formal denominational structure added to the religion’s relative invisibility, except as the object of fears or the butt of jokes.

In several ways, though, Paganism was waiting for modernity to catch up with it. The emphasis on the worship of nature in virtually all variations of Pagan faith, and the embrace of a female divinity in many, situated the religion to mesh with the environmental and feminist movements that swept through the United States in the 1970s.

In the 1970s, Wiccan groups began seeking and obtaining tax-exempt status from federal and state authorities, said the Rev. Selena Fox, the founder and spiritual leader of an early, influential Wicca church, Circle Sanctuary in Barneveld, Wis. By the decade’s end, Wicca was included in the handbook for military chaplains and had been written about in such popular books as “Drawing Down the Moon,” (Penguin, 2006), by Margot Adler.

Full NY Times article here

Blessed Samhain

I've cleaned and rearranged my alter and am knitting a Samhain wrap for next year. It has all of the colors of the Autumn trees in the Adirondacks. I am bearing witness without judgment. I have found a wonderful, meaningful morning prayer. I am feeling the thinning of the veil. I am cooking my Mama's squash soup. I am surviving the hardest year of my life and celebrating the year that I have learned the most.

Blessed be. May your Samhain be as bountiful as mine.

Photo found here

Helen Thomas' Five Presidential Lessons

No. 1

Mr. President, you've probably already realized that your inauguration is likely to be the happiest day of your presidency. If only you could make that feeling last forever. The White House can be one of the loneliest places in the world. Just look at the physical deterioration some have suffered during their years in office.

If you do not want more gray hair, be prepared for a dye job.

Most presidents leave Washington with, at best, mixed feelings toward the place and many with whom they've worked -- especially the press. Perhaps that is why they choose never to live there again after leaving office and visit infrequently.

John F. Kennedy once called Washington a city of "Southern efficiency and Northern charm."

Harry Truman famously said that if you want a friend in Washington, "Get a dog."

Next 4 lessons found Here

Martha Coakley, Ted Kennedy's Replacement?

This Week Magazine has a interesting story on Martha Coakley, who is a frontrunner for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, Via The Wild Hunt.

Day-care sex abuse case haunts Massachusetts Senate race
Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, the Democratic front-runner to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, didn’t prosecute the notorious Fells Acres Day Care case. But when she had a chance to help end the 'travesty,' she took the easy way out.

By Francis Wilkinson

Roman Polanski may not be alone in facing new scrutiny for an old sex crime, though in Massachusetts it's the actions of a former prosecutor, not a perpetrator, that are in question. Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley is the front-runner in the campaign to fill the U.S. Senate seat held for 46 years by Ted Kennedy. Coakley rose in politics via the Middlesex District Attorney's office, which was the unrelenting engine behind the Fells Acres Day Care prosecution, perhaps the most notorious among the wave of child sex abuse cases that swept the nation in the 1980s.

Coakley did not prosecute the case, which was already under way when she joined the office as an assistant district attorney in 1986. But years later, after the day-care abuse hysteria had subsided and she had won the office's top job, she worked to keep the convicted "ringleader," Gerald Amirault, behind bars despite widespread doubts that a crime had been committed.

Unlike Polanski's guilt, which was convincing enough in the 1970s and seems at least as compelling now, the convictions won by the Middlesex DA in the Fells Acres case have not borne up well. By today's standards, the prosecution of the Amirault family, who owned and operated the day-care center in Malden, Mass., looks like a master class in battling witchcraft. After an initial allegation surfaced under dubious circumstances, parents were summoned by local police and encouraged to grill their young children, predominantly ages 3 to 5. In the scattershot search for evidence, which the children ultimately produced by the truckload, hysteria reigned. Parents shared their fears along with their children's sometimes fantastical revelations. A pediatric nurse and other "experts" then followed up, posing leading, even badgering, questions to the children to produce a portrait of almost supernatural predation.

Children claimed to have been raped by knives that left no wounds. They said they had been tied to a tree on the day-care grounds. They said they had been molested by a man—Gerald Amirault—in a clown costume and spoke of a magic room and a secret room. No teacher, parent or other adult witnessed any of it—despite their regular proximity to the Amiraults and the exceedingly baroque, time-consuming nature of the alleged abuse. Physical evidence was remarkably scant.

The allegations were similar to those produced in other day-care cases, from New Jersey to California, in which charges were ultimately dismissed. Research by Cornell professor Stephen Ceci and others has established that children can be highly susceptible to ideas introduced by adults, and can shape their recollections to suit a grown-up's narrative. (See this ABC News video). As former Massachusetts Attorney General James Shannon wrote in The Boston Globe, Gerald Amirault's "conviction rested largely on the constitutionally defective testimony of the young children."

The fact that the Fells Acres case took place in suburban Boston makes it all the more vexing. While Middlesex prosecutors were pursuing the Amiraults for spectacular assaults involving dozens of victims, Catholic priests in the area were quietly raping local children one by one, without the benefit of magic rooms or clown costumes. Just two years after the Fells Acres prosecution concluded, one of the prosecutors, Laurence Hardoon, opted not to prosecute a priest, Rev. Paul Tivnan, who had molested a young boy for years. Hardoon later explained that it seemed appropriate to provide the priest with treatment, not jail time. In response to a second molestation allegation against Tivnan, church records indicated that Tivnan said he "didn't realize it was so harmful," according to the MetroWest Daily News, a local paper. The Amiraults, by contrast, were each sentenced to grinding prison terms, with Gerald getting the most—30 to 40 years. All three Amiraults adamantly insisted that the charges were baseless and refused to bargain with prosecutors; they paid for their defiance with longer sentences.

Full story is Here

The Real Questions

I don't think Americans are asking the right questions. It isn't whether Obama is tough enough. The real questions are:

Is Obama experienced enough?
Is Obama too beholden to corporate interests?
Is Obama too worried about how his presidency will be seen in history?
Is Obama relying on Rahm and Axelrod too much?
Does Obama understand economics?
Does Obama listen?
Does Obama care?

And, these questions should have been asked and answered before he was in office, not after. Hillary's 3:00AM campaign commercial keeps running through my head.