The Sins Of The Fathers

I love a good boycott. There is nothing more fulfilling as a consumer to see a company go out of business if the way they conduct themselves is less than you like.

I noticed a few weeks ago that Hooters on Airport Road is closed! Oh, what a shame, they can no longer demean women, and the women who worked there can now go somewhere else for their daily dose of degradation. A successful boycott!

My boycott of Bess Eaton Donuts resulted in their demise also. (yep, I'm taking full credit.) Had they refrained from putting biblical quotes on the coffee cups and donut boxes, there might have still been time to make the donuts (whoops, isn't that Dunkin Donut's catch phrase?) I know I wasn't the only one to be offended by their actions, actually the actions of their founder and chairman; Angelo Gencarelli. As a so-called "born again" christian, he felt that he needed to get his message out about his religious beliefs. As consumers, we decided that his messages were offensive and chose instead to make DD one of the most profitable entities in RI. At the end of his little reign Mr. Gencarelli filed for bankruptcy amid questions about their financial dealings. So much for his christian character, hmmm? Another successful boycott!

And speaking of christians, then there are the catholics. I was raised roman catholic and even as a young child found their celebration of mass to be a bit ridiculous. Of course, I find any sort of ceremony to be a bit silly, always asking myself who came up with this stuff? Sit, stand, and kneel; all on demand. I really never got it about a higher power either. Who says? Because it's written in a book? A baby whose mother was a virgin? A guy who walked on water and fed a lot of people with a little bit of food? A guy who rose from the dead? Sounds like a magician to me, or maybe just a tall tale - like Paul Bunyan. I just don't get it, period. But I acknowledge that there are people who believe, and while I don't get that either, I respect their right to their own beliefs.

However...

I have been boycotting the catholic church for a very long time. Yes, even when a kid asks me to buy a candy bar, I always have to ask who they are selling it for. It's hard to say no to those kids, but once I had realized that the catholic church employees (bishops and priests) said one thing and did the exact (and sometimes extreme) other thing, there really was no choice. Like child sexual abuse, also known as pedophilia.

I have up close and personal experiences in that department, and as a result I have always felt that one of my duties in life is to protect those who cannot protect themselves; your children.

So today I read another report of another diocese paying out money to the victims of these horrible priests. Here's a listing, get your calculators out, because we are talking HUGE amounts of money:

The Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego said Friday it has agreed to pay $198.1 million to settle 144 claims of sexual abuse by clergy, the second-largest payment by a diocese.Earlier this year, the diocese abruptly filed for bankruptcy protection (still, they didn't want to live up to their responsibilities) just hours before trial was scheduled to begin on 42 lawsuits alleging sexual abuse. Bankruptcy could shield the diocese's assets, but a judge recently threatened to throw out the bankruptcy case if church officials didn't reach an agreement with the plaintiffs. Thank goodness for that judge!

In the largest payment yet in the scandal, the Los Angeles Archdiocese settled 508 cases for $660 million in July, two days before jury selection was scheduled to begin in the first of 15 trials involving 172 abuse claimants there. (Again, they tried to get out of it.)

The Diocese of Orange agreed in 2004 to settle 90 claims for $100 million after a judge promised to set trial dates and begin the discovery process if settlement talks collapsed.

Diocese of Covington, Ky., 2006, up to $84 million for more than 350 people.

Archdiocese of Boston, 2003, $84 million for 552 claims.

Diocese of Oakland, Calif., 2005, $56 million to 56 people.

Archdiocese of Portland, Ore., 2007, agrees to pay about $52 million to 175 victims to emerge from bankruptcy protection; sets aside another $20 million for any future claims.

Diocese of Spokane, Wash., 2007, agrees to pay $48 million for about 150 claims to emerge from bankruptcy protection.

Diocese of Sacramento, Calif., 2005, pays $35 million to 33 people.

Archdiocese of Louisville, Ky., 2003, $25.7 million to 243 victims.

Diocese of Tucson, Ariz., 2005, agrees to fund a settlement trust worth about $22 million for more than 50 victims to emerge from bankruptcy protection.

The Davenport, Iowa diocese, which faces claims from more than 150 people, is still in proceedings.

"The diocese has always been committed to resolving this litigation in a way that fairly compensates these victims of abuse and would still preserve the ongoing ministries and programs of the church," Bishop Robert Brom (of San Diego) said in a press release Friday. "We pray that this settlement will bring some closure and healing to the years of suffering experienced by these victims."

Well Bishop Robert Bozo, what you don't realize is that these "victims" are really survivors! They have lived their entire lives tortured by the memories of what was perpetrated upon them when they were just little kids! There isn't enough money in the world that could fix that for them. Shame on the catholic church, from every pope, bishop and priest who had any involvement or knowledge of what was happening repeatedly from one side of this country to the other and did nothing! Nothing!!!

I'm hopeful for yet another successful boycott.

Dimwit's A Trial

The Dimwit had her trial yesterday and I am amazed as well as disappointed in the Judicial System. All morning I was hoping that she wouldn't return from her court date. Yet at 12:30 I saw the Idiot drive into the driveway. At first I didn't think she was in the car and I was jumping for joy (okay, on the inside.) But there she was, much to my dismay.

I checked the Court System web site this morning and found that she had changed her plea from not guilty to nolo contendere and was re-arraigned while there yesterday. Listed below are the results of the trial:

Possession SCH 1-5 controlled substance: pleaded nolo*, sentence deferred, substance abuse counselling, 100 hours of community service

Possession SCH 1-5 controlled substance: pleaded nolo*, sentence deferred, total assessments (not sure what that means?)

Possession SCH 1-5 controlled substance: dismissed

Driving with suspended license: dismissed

*Nolo Contendere: (in a criminal case) a defendant's pleading that does not admit guilt but subjects him or her to punishment as though a guilty plea had been entered, the determination of guilt remaining open in other proceedings.

I'm assuming that she is still on home confinement, according to the Corrections Dept. web site, that ends in November.

So now I get to check with the landlady to see what's going on from her end. Hopefully the eviction notice has been delivered and it's only a matter of time that she is out of here.

If not her, then me.

Speaking of Emi...

As promised, here's Emilee with the purse teapot that she painted at Clayground this past Saturday.

Mike and Emi Knievel

I got my motorcycle in 1975 - and, at times, it was my only means of transportation. I drove it year 'round, and like the mailman, through rain and sleet and snow. One of my favorite things to do was to get on the highway late at night and draft behind the 18-wheelers as they cruised along. I’d put the motorcycle in neutral and hold on for the ride. Of course, that was when there were only 18-wheelers on the road late at night (or early morning depends on your thinking, I guess.) Sadly, my motorcycle was stolen after a few years and that ended my Easy Rider time of life.

I still have trouble believing that my brother Michael has a motorcycle! He is the last one I'd have thought would do so.

I’ve always described Mike as Alex P. Keaton (from Family Ties); he was just like that as a teenager. Mike always followed the rules. He didn’t party. He didn’t rebel. He was a good student, smart and a very hard worker.

So, when he told me he was going to take the motorcycle course I thought, "oh boy." But he finished the course and went searching for a motorcycle before he got his motorcycle license. I actually didn’t see the motorcycle for several weeks after he got it and it was Emilee who introduced me to it. She had ridden over to an uncle’s house on the back and enjoyed it. Since then, she’s become a regular biker chick!

Today was the first time I actually saw both Mike and Emi on the motorcycle. Chelsea snapped some pictures as they rode off to Emi’s karate lesson (she’s something, isn’t she?) I can only imagine that when she grows up she’ll probably have a motorcycle before she has a car.

Whether it's a mid-life crisis (he did turn 40 this year, after all) or finally his time to be a rebel, it delights and terrifies me all at the same time. Though I suppose that I would have been terrified if he was a rebel as a teenager as well, but now he has a wife and 3 kids. Though, at the same time, I know the joy and exhilaration, as well as the relaxation of riding. I suppose that with all the motorcycles on the road nowadays that drivers are more aware of them. But I’ll keep my fingers crossed, not for Michael to drive safely (as I know he does), but that some idiot doesn’t run into him.

And if I EVER hear of him getting on the highway and drafting behind a 18-wheeler, he won’t have to be afraid about how safe it is or not, because it will be me he needs to be afraid of!!!

SPECIAL COMMENT

By Keith Olbermann

Anchor,

'Countdown'
MSNBC

And so he is back from his annual surprise gratuitous photo-op in Iraq, and what a sorry spectacle it was. But it was nothing compared to the spectacle of one unfiltered, unguarded, horrifying quotation in the new biography to which Mr. Bush has consented.

As he deceived the troops at Al-Asad Air Base yesterday with the tantalizing prospect that some of them might not have to risk being killed and might get to go home, Mr. Bush probably did not know that, with his own words, he had already proved that he had been lying, is lying and will be lying about Iraq.

He presumably did not know that there had already appeared those damning excerpts from Robert Draper's book “Dead Certain." “I'm playing for October-November," Mr. Bush said to Draper. That, evidently, is the time during which, he thinks he can sell us the real plan, which is “to get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence."

Comfortable, that is, with saying about Iraq, again quoting the President, “stay... longer."

And there it is. We've caught you. Your goal is not to bring some troops home, maybe, if we let you have your way now. Your goal is not to set the stage for eventual withdrawal. You are, to use your own disrespectful, tone-deaf word, playing at getting the next Republican nominee to agree to jump into this bottomless pit with you, and take us with him, as we stay in Iraq for another year, and another, and another, and anon.

Everything you said about Iraq yesterday, and everything you will say, is a deception, for the purpose of this one cynical, unacceptable, brutal goal: perpetuating this war indefinitely.

War today, war tomorrow, war forever!

And you are playing at it! Playing!

A man with any self respect, having inadvertently revealed such an evil secret, would have already resigned and fled the country! You have no remaining credibility about Iraq.

And yet, yesterday at Al-Asad, Mr. Bush kept playing, and this time, using the second of his two faces.

The president told reporters, “They (General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker) tell me if the kind of success we are now seeing continues, it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces."

And so, Mr. Bush got his fraudulent headlines today. “Bush May Bring Some Troops Home."

While the reality is, we know from what he told Draper, that the president's true hope is that they will not come home; but that they will stay there, because he is keeping them there now, in hope that those from his political party fighting to succeed him will prolong this unendurable disaster into the next decade.

But, to a country dying of thirst, the president seemed to vaguely promise a drink from a full canteen -- a promise predicated on the assumption that he is not lying.

Yet you are lying, Mr. Bush. Again. But now, we know why.

You gave away more of yourself than you knew in the Draper book. And you gave away more still, on the arduous trip back out of Iraq hours in the air, without so much as a single vacation.

“If you look at my comments over the past eight months," you told reporters, “it's gone from a security situation in the sense that we're either going to get out and there will be chaos, or, more troops. Now, the situation has changed, where I'm able to speculate on the hypothetical."

Mr. Bush, the only "hypothetical" here is that you are not now holding our troops hostage. You have no intention of withdrawing them. But that doesn't mean you can't pretend you're thinking about it, does it?

That is your genius as you see it, anyway. You can deduce what we want. We, the people, remember us? And then use it against us.

You can hold that canteen up and promise it to the parched nation. And the untold number of Americans whose lives have not been directly blighted by Iraq or who do not realize that their safety has been reduced and not increased by Iraq, they will get the bullet points: "Bush is thinking about bringing some troops home. Bush even went to Iraq."

You can fool some of the people all of the time, can't you, Mr. Bush? You are playing us!

And as for the most immediate victims of the president's perfidy and shameless manipulation of those troops -- yesterday sweating literally as he spoke at Al-Asad Air Base -- tonight, again sweating figuratively in The Valley Of The Shadow Of Death, the president saved, for them, the most egregious "playing" in the entire trip.

“I want to tell you this about the decision, about my decision about troop levels. Those decisions will be based on a calm assessment by our military commanders on the conditions on the ground, not a nervous reaction by Washington politicians to poll results in the media."

One must compliment Mr. Bush's writer. That, perhaps, was the mostly perfectly-crafted phrase of his presidency. For depraved indifference to democracy, for the craven projection of political motives onto those trying to save lives and save a nation, for a dismissal of the value of the polls and the importance of the media, for a summary of all he does not hold dear about this nation or its people nothing could top that.

As if you listened to all the "calm assessments" of our military commanders rather than firing the ones who dared say the emporer has no clothes, and the president, no judgment.

As if your entire presidency was not a “nervous reaction," and you yourself, nothing but a Washington politician.

As if “the media" does not largely divide into those parts your minions are playing, and those others who unthinkingly and uncritically serve as your echo chamber, at a time when the nation's future may depend on the airing of dissent.

And as if those polls were not so overwhelming, and not so clearly reflective of the nation's agony and the nation's insistence.

But this president has ceased to listen. This president has decided that night is day, and death is life, and enraging the world against us is safety. And this laziest of presidents, actually interrupted his precious time off to fly to Iraq to play at a photo opportunity with soldiers, some of whom will on his orders be killed before the year maybe the month is out.

Just over 500 days remain in this presidency. Consider the dead who have piled up on the battlefield in these last 500 days.

Consider the singular fraudulence of this president's trip to Iraq yesterday, and the singular fraudulence of the selling of the Petraeus Report in these last 500 days.

Consider how this president has torn away at the fabric of this nation in a manner of which terrorists can only dream in these last 500 days.

And consider again how this president has spoken to that biographer: that he is “playing for October-November." The goal in Iraq is “to get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence." Consider how this revelation contradicts every other rationale he has offered in these last 500 days.

In the context of all that now, consider these next 500 days.

Mr. Bush, our presence in Iraq must end. Even if it means your resignation. Even if it means your impeachment. Even if it means a different Republican to serve out your term. Even if it means a Democratic Congress and those true patriots among the Republicans standing up and denying you another penny for Iraq, other than for the safety and the safe conduct home of our troops.

This country cannot run the risk of what you can still do to this country in the next 500 days.

Not while you are playing.

The Need For Glasses

On the way to pick up Emilee late on Friday afternoon, I got stopped in some traffic in EG. As I stepped on the gas to go, a little picture warning light came on very briefly on the dashboard of my car. I had my sunglasses on and I couldn't see what the picture was of, I just noticed that it was lit for a second. I figured I'd get a better look when I stopped again.

Don't ya know it - I didn't stop again until I was in front of the airport - I never get all the way through Apponaug right before 5 on a Friday afternoon without many stops - but this Friday I did! So the next time the warning was on for just a second again, I thought it was the battery box pictured. I called Michael and asked if he had any distilled water - nope. I had bought a gallon of distilled water several months ago when I showed Veronica how to add water to the battery, but she had dumped it one night. Seems she and some friends were on a leaky boat off Jamestown one night and they needed a bailing bucket.

After picking up Emi we went to the auto store to buy some motor oil and distilled water. But they don't sell distilled water at the auto store! So we took a ride by Vanessa's apartment (no one was home) on the way to the cell phone store. Now each time I stop, the warning light flashes on for a moment and I worried that each time I turned the car off that it might not start again. The cell phone store was a mob scene, so Emilee and I headed to NK, deciding that we'd get Subway for dinner. After a quick stop at Dave's to pick up milk and chocolate ice cream (for you know who) as well as distilled water. I asked a clerk at Dave's where to find distilled water and he pointed to an entire wall of water and water products. After a few minutes, Emi went off to find the clerk, because we couldn't find the distilled water. He came over and pointed to a section of Poland Spring water that had the smallest print DISTILLED above the label. Off we went to Subway. We got our sandwiches and headed to my apartment, I'm thinking after we eat I'll go out and put the distilled water in the battery so that the car will start in the morning.

Well, I didn't do my maintenance on the car until the next afternoon, as we were leaving for Clayground. After taking off the 2 bungee cords, pulling the wire for the hood release, the battery cells looked pretty full, but I poured the distilled water in them anyway, checked the oil (okay) and looked over at the overflow for the radiator, which looked full.

The car started right up and the stupid picture warning light came on again! I'm thinking what the heck could be the problem, I just checked everything!?! Figuring I'll deal with it later I pulled out of the driveway and decided to put my glasses on to look at the warning picture when it came on again, which it did about 30 feet down the road. It was the little picture of a box with a spout on the top and a fan in the middle!! The radiator fluid was low! I pulled into a driveway of a house that has been for sale and is vacant down the road, took the bungee cords off (again) and opened the hood. Sure enough, what looked like a full overflow tank at my house, was an empty one at the house down the street. The trunk of my car is like a mini auto store, stocked with just about everything you could possibly need in case of emergency maintenance - which this was, by now - so I poured some antifreeze into the overflow tank.

And guess what, the stupid little picture warning light never came on again!

The British Are Leaving, The British Are Leaving...

...Iraq, that is.

They began withdrawing their troops from their last base in Basra. Because of this, the Iraqi military sent hundreds of reinforcements to Basra (about frickin time.) The British are in the process of moving these troops into Afghanistan, (where they should have been all along.)

However, the head of the security committee for Basra fears that the Iraqi military is incapable of maintaining order. (Hmmm, we can send our soldiers halfway across the world and have them killed by the thousands and the Iraqi military, which has been training for over 4 years now, is still incapable of maintaining order. Unbelievable.

In the meantime, a second retired British general slammed the United States over its Iraq policy, saying in a newspaper interview published Sunday that it had been "fatally flawed" blaming Donald H (for horrible) Rumsfeld for dismissing warnings in 2003 about the lack of detail that had gone into the postwar plan.

The first retired British general also singled out Rumsfeld for criticism, saying his approach to the invasion was "intellectually bankrupt."

You did a heck of a job, Rumy!!

Too Pooped To Blog

As you could see from Emilee's blog, she slept over and spent quite a bit of time blogging on the computer. Before and after blogging, she and I went to Clayground where we both painted ceramics. She painted a purse teapot and I painted a pig piggy bank for JaeMae. I completely forgot to take pictures to post, so I'll do that once I pick the items up later in the week.

I am off to bed, will blog longer tomorrow. It's hard to keep my eyes open...

emilee's blogg

hi, i am emilee and this picture is of at the beach playing in the sand.

my friends were there bet they are not in this picture your friend emilee i am blogging because i am sleeping ovor aunties house to night because i nevr see her before the beach and camping.



i took a picture of my baby kittin and he's cute and his name is moshmelow. i like the name moshmelow. moshmelow is a nice name is it yes it is he has a coler it is pink and it rings too isit cool i thik he is do you... i like my baby kittin he is cute and small. but i still love him alot.

What A Bunch Of Crap

by Tom Doggett

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Big oil companies did not conspire to raise U.S. gasoline prices last summer, as it was high crude oil costs and supply problems that caused the spike in pump prices, government investigators said on Thursday. The Federal Trade Commission said that about 75 percent of the rise in gasoline prices was due to a seasonal increase in summer driving, higher oil costs and more expensive ethanol that was blended into gasoline.

The other 25 percent of the price increase stemmed from lower gasoline production as refiners moved to using ethanol as the main clean-burning fuel additive and lingering damage from hurricanes Katrina and Rita that reduced refining capacity.

"Our targeted examination of major refinery outages revealed no evidence that refiners conspired to restrict supply or otherwise violated antitrust laws," the FTC said. "We therefore conclude that further investigation of the nationwide 2006 gasoline price spike is not warranted at this time."

Many lawmakers at the time had accused oil companies, which were raking in billions of dollars in record profits, of overcharging U.S. consumers at the pump.

President George W. Bush directed the FTC and the Justice and Energy Departments to look into whether manipulation or other illegal activity by oil companies was behind the sharp rise in gasoline prices.

The national retail monthly average gasoline price jumped from $2.28 a gallon in February 2006 to $2.89 by the beginning of May, and then declined slightly through June. Prices started rising again in July and hit a peak of $3.02 a gallon during the second week of August, and then took a steep decline to $2.18 by the end of October.

The FTC said its investigation found the increases in motor fuel prices "were caused by a confluence of factors reflecting the normal operation of the market."

FTC Commissioner Jon Leibowitz dissented from the report's conclusions and issued a separate statement that said the agency developed a "theoretical model" for why gasoline prices likely increased.

Leibowitz said he believes "there was profiteering (by oil companies) at the expense of consumers."


(acdc) Sounds like this guy Leibowitz is the only one in DC who realizes that the oil companies can't have record profits just because the refiners were making some changes. Even if those changes were costly, the oil companies should not have had billions in profits that broke records.

Freaking Fantastic Freakonomics

I've always considered myself to be a reader. As a kid I would read under the covers with a flashlight. Through school I always enjoyed the books we were assigned to read; 1984, The Grapes of Wrath, The Scarlet Letter, Jonathan Livingston Seagull among many others.

Mostly I read mysteries, detective stories and the occasional biography. I've been a fan of Stephen King since I picked up Carrie, his first book. I have lots of other favorite authors and, of course, my favorite characters in their books.

I always go to my library's website and request any books that sound interesting or has been recommended to me. A few weeks ago, Lillian gave me (as she often does) the names of a couple of books that she had heard of. I'm probably the only person who has their library card number (all 14 digits) memorized. I've no idea what my license number is, or my bank account number, but I do know my library card number by heart.

The books that Lil recommended were Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner and The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. I haven't even gotten to the second book yet, I am so fascinated by the first. Both books are somewhat similar; they give you a different way to look at the world around you.

Freakonomics is absolutely fascinating. The chapters have titles like;
What do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers have in common?
How is the Ku Klux Klan like a group of real estate agents?
Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?

I was hooked just reading the introduction, part of which is:

Anyone living in the United States in the early 1990s and paying even a whisper of attention to the nightly news or a daily paper could be forgiven for having been scared out of his skin.

The culprit was crime. It had been rising relentlessly-a graph plotting the crime rate in any American city over recent decades looked like a ski slope in profile-and it seemed now to herald the end of the world as we knew it. Death by gunfire, intentional and otherwise, had become commonplace. So too had carjacking and crack dealing, robbery and rape. Violent crime was a gruesome, constant companion. And things were about to get even worse. Much worse. All of the experts were saying so.

The cause was the so called superpredator. For a time, he was everywhere. Glowering from the cover of newsweeklies. Swaggering his way through foot-thick government reports. He was a scrawny, big-city teenager with a cheap gun in his hand and nothing in his heart but ruthlessness. There were thousands out there just like him, we were told, a generation of killers about to hurl the country into deepest chaos.

In 1995 the criminologist James Alan Fox wrote a report for the US attorney general that grimly detailed the coming spike in murders by teenagers. Fox proposed optimistic and pessimistic scenarios. In the optimistic scenario, he believed, the rate of teen homicides would rise another 15 percent over the next decade; in the pessimistic scenario, it would more than double. "The next crime wave will get so bad," he said, "that it will make 1995 look like the good old days."

Other criminologists, political scientists, and similarly learned forecasters laid out the same horrible future, as did President Clinton. "We know we've got about six years to turn this juvenile crime thing around," Clinton said, "or our country is going to be living with chaos. And my successors will not be giving speeches about the wonderful opportunities of the global economy; they'll be trying to keep body and soul together for people on the streets of these cities." The smart money was plainly on the criminals.

And then, instead of going up and up and up, crime began to fall. And fall and fall and fall some more. The crime drop was startling in several respects. It was ubiquitous, with every category of crime falling in every part of the country. It was persistent, with incremental decreases year after year. And it was entirely unanticipated - especially by the very experts who had been predicting the opposite.

The magnitude of the reversal was astounding. The teenage murder rate, instead of rising 100 percent or even 15 percent as James Alan Fox had warned, fell more than 50 percent within five years. By 2000 the overall murder rate in the United States had dropped to it's lowest level in thirty-five years. So had the rate of just about every other sort of crime, from assault to car theft.

Even though the experts had failed to anticipate the crime drop - which was in fact well under way even as they made their horrifying predictions - they now hurried to explain it. Most of their theories sounded perfectly logical. It was the roaring 1990s economy, they said, that helped turn back crime. It was the proliferation of gun control laws, they said. It was the sort of innovative policing strategies put into place in New York City, where murder rates would fall from 2,245 in 1990 to 596 in 2003.

These theories were not only logical; they were also encouraging for they attributed the crime drop to specific and recent human initiatives. If it was gun control and clever police strategies and better paying jobs that quelled crime - well then, the power to stop criminals had been within our reach all along. As it would be the next time, God forbid, that crime got so bad.

These theories made their way, seemingly without question, from the experts' mouths to journalists' ears to the public's mind. In short, they became conventional wisdom.

There was only one problem: they weren't true.

There was another factor, meanwhile, that had greatly contributed to the massive crime drop of the 1990s. It had taken shape more than twenty years earlier and concerned a young woman in Dallas named Norma McCorvey.

Like the proverbial butterfly that flaps it wings on one continent and eventually causes a hurricane on another, Norma McCorvey dramatically altered the course of events without intending to. All she had wanted was an abortion. She was a poor, uneducated, unskilled, alcoholic, drug-using twenty-one-year-old woman who had already given up two children for adoption and now, in 1970, found herself pregnant again. But in Texas, as in all but a few states at that time, abortion was illegal. McCorvey's cause came to be adopted by people far more powerful than she. They made her the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit seeking to legalize abortion. The defendant was Henry Wade, the Dallas County district attorney. The case ultimately made it to the US Supreme Court, by which time McCorvey's name had been disguised as Jane Roe. On January 22, 1973, the court ruled in favor of Ms. Roe, allowing legalized abortion throughout the country. By this time, of course, it was far too late for Ms. McCorvey/Roe to have her abortion. She had given birth and put the child up for adoption. (Years later she would renounce her allegiance to legalized abortion and become a pro-life activist.)

So how did Roe v. Wade help trigger, a generation later, the greatest crime drop in recorded history?

As far as crime is concerned, it turns out that not all children are born equal. Not even close. Decades of studies have show that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade - poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get - were often models of adversity. They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe v. Wade, these children weren't being born. This powerful cause would have a drastic, distant effect: years later, just as these unborn children would have entered their criminal primes, the rate of crime began to plummet.

It wasn't gun control or a strong economy or new police strategies that finally blunted the American crime wave. It was, among other factors, the reality that the pool of potential criminals had dramatically shrunk.

Now, as the crime-drop experts (the former crime doomsayers) spun their theories to the media, how many times did they cite legalized abortion as a cause? Zero.

I hope you found that part of their introduction as fascinating as I did. (The authors revisited this in a later chapter.) The book just gets better and really makes you look at things in a new and different way.

I'm sure you're tired of reading by now, so I'll leave you with this one thought. Get this book! Whether you borrow it from the library or you buy it from Amazon ($16.77) it is a MUST READ!